A Big “Yes” To Yesware: Insanely Easy Email Tracking

I mean, there are paid versions – but I can’t believe the free version is free. And even though 90% of my time spent doing SEO is not on link building, I am what you’d call a “heavy user” of email. I know a promising tool when I see it.

I serendipitously stumbled upon Yesware from this website when I was looking up marketing / media agencies near me in Woostah.

Yesware does a few things:

Tracks emails – you can see when someone has read your email, and more (please read their FAQ for info on any limitations)

Custom email templates

CRM Sync – connect email right to your CRM

Analytics – see your email analytics right in Gmail

It’s designed and marketed for Sales. But, “Hello” link builders… meet your new best friend.

The essence of what I’ll be reviewing today, is their free Gmail Plugin for email tracking – although they do have a variety of pricing options and levels. (FYI – Yesware did not ask me to write this review.)

1. The Tour

Sooo easy. This is one of the biggest selling points. The interface is incredibly easy to use, right from within Gmail;

The Inbox

The Compose Window

Here’s what the compose window now looks like – I was testing it out on Ross;

To track when an email gets opened and/or a link gets clicked from within an email, just check off “track” right within compose. Free users can track 100 emails a month.

Pop Up Alerts When Someone Reads An Email

This alert will pop up on your desktop when someone opens an email you’ve been tracking.

Alerts / Status Above Your Inbox

Note that it tells us:

The time it was sent

The time it was last read

What device it was read on

Where it was read

But wait. There’s more. Way more.

View Lists Of “Events”, Emails and Goals

I don’t even know what you can do with “goals” (I haven’t gotten that far) but it’s crazy what you can do with just Events and Emails.

There’s tons of data in here – and I have to say the interface does a good job at packing it in, but minimizing “overwhelm”.

The email data view is out of this world…

Notice you get:

The ability to filter/search

Open status

Clicked link status

Replied status

Ready to flip out?

Map View

Yep – they went there. I’ll say it again. Vista de mapa!! See all of your events on a map. Turn on satellite view for fun.

Reminders

“RemindMe lets you set a reminder for yourself to follow up on an email. RemindMe will bring a message back to your Gmail inbox in the future if you haven’t yet received a reply. (You can also set reminders that come back to you even if a recipient does reply.)”

#Slick

2. A Tool Like Yesware Changes The Game

Like I said at the beginning – I’m not doing intensive outreach-linkbuilding all the time. But, even as an email user – someone who also uses email to (sometimes) attempt to get a desired (re)action – I’m familiar with the process.

This process is blind. It would be like web analytics without “visits”.

I’ll say that again. In bold. Email without an “opened” metric is like a website without a “visits” metric.

The following diagram is a little in jest. But I’m willing to bet THIS is closer to how we imagine people open, read and respond to email than reality.

What REALLY Happens

We haven’t even added a time dimension to this yet. We’re just looking at open metrics. The recipient:

Opened it once

Opened it twice

Opened it a third time

THEN replied.

A Closer Look At The “Open” Metric

Let’s talk about the “open” metric (which is akin to “visits”). There’s a few dimensions to these:

Location

Device

And of course – “opens” being a metrics – you can have “amount of opens”. Here’s the reality.

People open emails, multiple times, on multiple devices, from multiple locations.

In the few days I was testing this tool – that’s the reality I saw more often than not. Here’s a REAL example.

Psychology Of Opening Mail – Mobile vs. Desktop

The key thing to realize here is – opened does NOT = read. Opened, in many cases (especially if from a mobile device) could more likely mean lost or forgotten.

3. Practical Applications

1. Make Better “Should I Follow Up?” Decisions

I think one of the key questions a tool like this can help us answer is: should I follow up? A tool like this adds a few HUGE data points to help you make that decision.

This should be a very personal and situation specific decision. But the fact is, where’re not in the dark anymore – for starters, we actually know if they even OPENED the email at all.

2. Correlate User Behavior W/ Likelihood To Get Response

I’m pretty sure once you get into it, Yesware will help you keep track of some of this stuff automatically. But automatic or manually – you should begin to correlate (even just intuitively) when you are most likely to receive a response – and you may even be able to segment this to different people.

maybe a particular person checks their email at a certain time

maybe a particular person responds to emails at a certain time

maybe some people have the best intentions, intend to reply, but tend to be a little forgetful. If you see they’ve opened it already – wait a day and follow up.

3. Test Click Through Rate!

This is nothing new to email marketing. But why should the email marketers have all the fun? Email tracking for the everyday folk allows us to bring a more scientific approach to email subject writing.

4. Time / Email Management

I LIKE that this adds a time management layer to email as well. As we all know, email can be a huge time-sink… but I think that’s ’cause in general it keeps a lot of the demand on our memory and repetitive manual processing rather than in the email its self.

I should note: I practice inboxzero – and this Yesware seems to play very nicely with the inboxzero method. Inboxzero is all about – “touch something once”, “act on it immediately or set a reminder to deal with it later”. In other words: get it out of your mental bandwidth.

195 Comments

Ian Rogers

Thanks for sharing Dan! I’ve messed around with Boomerang and other similar Gmail extensions but this flat out off the hook! This is perfect for email outreach but can also be applied in so many other situations. Like you, I can’t believe the free version is so extensive. Thanks again!

Dan Shure

You bet man. Right, they found a way to pack a lot of stuff right in as a plugin. I don’t find the addition to Gmail overwhelming at all – which is a feat considering I have an insane about of plugins going to being with 😉

Randal Shurmer

jp

You do know that S Brin is Russian. Google outdoes the NSA, but it is about money, it makes no value judgements, it wants to enable you, not control you. I really believe.

September 16, 2014

Mike

You realize that the government buys that data from Google, right? Both in dollars and political favors such as Google getting to use pay the government rate for fuel in their jets. And they pay for all that with the money you pay them in taxes.

Steve

Are you kidding me? Okay, let me get this straight. You are telling me that Google, the company who makes their living off of data mining and using your data to keep track of you, the same company who is giving away Droid fro free (only the hardware is paid for by the end-user) because it gives the ability to know my each and every movement, now wants to give this same information about what I decide to do with incoming email to anyone who sends me anything?

Wow, to think I wouldn’t want that. What was I thinking? So, if I was a spammer, I could just send millions and millions of emails to everyone on every list I could find, and I would know?:

1. If it was a valid address
2. If they opened the email and how often
3. How many times they skimmed over it before finally deciding to open it

Where can I sign up? Are you F^&*king joking? Even the government doesn’t know have access to kind of information. Hell no, no F^&*king way buddy. Yeah, spammers are going to LOVE Google. You do realize that when you buy a Droid or Google Chrome (or any system that uses their technology) device, that you are pretty much giving them this information already. They don’t sell those devices so cheap because they are cheaper to make. No, they are not making a dime off of the actual sale. They are making their money off of the intimate ad enabling knowledge you are giving them, such as:

1. Every button you push, and how often
2. Where you surf on the Internet, what sites you visit, how often and for how long
3. Who you send emails to and what you say
4. What apps you purchase
5. What games you play
6. What articles you read
7. What sports you watch
8. Where you live
9. Where you go
10. How long you stay
11. Who you text and what you discuss
12. What social communities you belong to and how often you participate
13. Copies of all your photos

I couldn’t even think of all the ways you are giving up your privacy, any time you even get close to using any Google technology. They were once sued for taking those “street views” because they were taking (AND SHOWING) the insides of people’s homes.

The only useful, but private features they give you has been a part of Outlook for almost as long as it has been available. These same features are also available in their online product, Outlook.com (formerly Hotmailol.com). This includes things like tracking when your email is delivered or read, and that is called, a “Read Receipt” and “Delivery Receipt” and you do not get either of those without consent. The recipient gets a popup for each and they can decide if you should get that information. I personally think that, if I haven’t agreed to give you that information, that it is none of your business.

You need to rethink your position on this, or tell Google to start paying you for seducing others into giving them the ability to know your most innermost and intimate thoughts.

Anthony Pensabene

so the receiver knows you’re tracking the reception (maybe not in full detail)? that’s definitely interesting in itself. thanks for the ‘yes, we can do this’ info on the tool. i’m looking to start an email disco party, and knowing those kinds of metrics definitely makes sense in measuring return on effort/expectation.

Dan Shure

As far as I know (cause Ross tested it on me) the receiver does not know they are being tracked – although you DO have to accept “display images” from the sender as the way it tracks is with a 1px image in the email. This is how most email marketing programs (mailchimp etc) function.

Gavin

Well, because of this blog post I decided to try Yesware. I’m extremely impressed, but at the same time disturbed. This is scary to me how easy it is to track people reviewing my emails. I would hope Yesware would allow an ‘opt out of being tracked’ option, although I guess I’m a hypocrite because I will keep using their add-on :-/

juan percent

Dan,
you make the best possible case for this tool to be rejected in the public arena:
“As far as I know (cause Ross tested it on me) the receiver does not know they are being tracked “!
For the recipient(receiver – sic) to not have the same right to know who is tracking them as the sender (who read my message) is unfair and will be seen by most people(who care about privacy) as inherently unequal relationship. Is that really how you want to have your business model perceived? This tool may be easy to use, free, and have a great UI, but it reeks of Big Brother Marketing. Sorry, but no thanks.

Ian

I would like to remind you that almost every marketing email you get is tracking you. Regardless of who supplies you email. Yahoo, Google or your ISP.

December 8, 2014

Anon

Most of those marketing firms track with a cookie, and Google auto-enables image downloading in their mobile Gmail clients (and some people may have such a setting set in their iPhones, Windows Phones, Blackberries, etc.).

Additionally, most Mobile OSes and Web Browsers have a Do Not Track setting which most ethical companies will honor. You can opt out of DoubleClick Advertising and Tracking with a cookie or Plugin/ActiveX control.

I mean, the list goes on and on. There is nothing gained by basically adding ‘R’ to email. It will discourage people from opening them when they learn that these tools exist. I already basically do the same thing in IM. Read it in Notification Center and then swipe it away without opening the conversation because I don’t want people to keep “metrics” on how quickly/often/whatever I read and respond to their messages.

Ralph Shaw

Dan, your review is exceptional, in that I totally understand how & why the program functions. I’m slightly surprised to read all comments relating to tracking metrics; Outlook has employed that drill down tech since Office97. It stands to reason that the more informative, convenient, and otherwise useful our apps & programs deliver intell, the less secure our privacy becomes. By 2015, we should really ‘get it’ by now; any privacy we enjoyed 20 yrs ago is basically not private any longer. Outrageous? Yes. Deserving of stressful activity like wringing hands? No. Time for that would’ve been 1970.

Anon

Scott Pielsticker

Yesware has done a great job of putting email tracking into the spotlight, as well as educated people on the benefits. We (ContactMonkey.com) are another option to consider.

In many respects, we play in the same sandbox as Yesware but we’re taking a slightly differently approach by putting e-mail marketing tracking front and center with an always-on sidebar within Outlook and Gmail.

Thanks for putting the spotlight on email tracking, which we think is going to gain serious traction this year.

eliyas

spookysr

This is old technology from virus hackers. It exploits an invisible image tag in html (1-px size is invisible) and instead of a png, jpeg, or gif it has a url link to an ASP (Active Server Page) server-side website that silently captures your IP address, domain name, browser info, referring site (your email provider), time of visit, and what email you are tacitly responding to. Its all very sneaky. That’s why all the big name email services turn off image browsing at default. All systems are vulnerable to it if you turn on images for even a second. Even a virus can be saved to your internet cache for later deployment. So don’t turn on images from any GMAIL user. But anybody could do a homemade version from any email service if they had access to a ASP hosting service.

I suppose if email services activated smart content filters it could weed out image tag exploits like this. IOW if your text body was locally (client-side) scanned and it detected html image tags () that had no conventional simple images in the src reference then that would be a red flag. Also if it detect a ? in the src then it’s a definite red flag. That implies variable passing to a server. The variable would be your email identifier saying which email this was related to. Also the image src url would usually have a .asp or .php extension too.

Great idea which I tried once back in the 1990’s. But too lazy to fool around with it. Leave it to inQtel (oh sorry I meant Google) to decide to use it. No wonder it’s free. Otherwise people might get litigious if otherwise.

spookysr

Truth be told this exploit is not the worse there is. Everyone thought COOKIES were benign. And generically they are. Why? Because they can’t be viewed across different domains (or cross domains). Or so you thought until those little egg heads in Silicon Valley came up with a very clever coupe. They said just legally buy up as many Internet domains as you can and now you can get cookie data from just about anyone on the planet. To make that all very easy setup a centralized domain that sets and pulls cookies from their legal list of owned domains and can ‘seemingly’ view most cross domain cookies (kinda’ sorta’) as they OWN most of the other domains making it totally legal to make demands on webmasters, etc. Have you ever noticed a persistent cookie on your browser cache? How did it get there as you never visited that website? Oh yes you did. Using the same zero-image (or similar) exploit above.

They are not really violating browser cross domain security. They are secretly having you visit their website (tacitly by your choices) and setting the cookie for that secret domain. But if the website you were visiting on purpose allows that zero-image thingy to be there on their website than the thingy KNOWS what website it was placed on (via referrer code), when you visited it, and maybe all the other stuff I mentioned in my last posting.

All very sneaky. I hope I’m explaining it correctly. It may be more complicated than I’m saying (or not).

himagain

James K

Unless I misremember, Gmail started with the email images turned ON, and because I was on dialup, I shut them off.

Though NOW I keep images shut off for a whole different set of reasons. Mostly spammers. Secondarily, my privacy is precious to me, and if you want my data, you’ll need to convince me that 1, my trust won’t be broken, and 2 that I’m going to be getting something of equivalent value.

It’s “tools” like these that make me almost compulsively suspicious about using corporate email response forms. (I take the time–sometimes it’s a long time–to find out the corporation’s email address and compose my email to sales or customer support on my own software.)

I found particularly cynical the claim that a piece of software can “Add empathy!” When I deal with my own clients, I use my brain and language and social skills to add empathy. I add empathy using empathy. I don’t need to rely on computer software to do it.

bxg

> Tracks emails – you can see when someone has read your email, and more

No you can’t (see this). If that’s literally what they promise, they are lying to you.
You CAN, POSSIBLY, track whether a certain non-random fraction of people have read your email
(I don’t know how small this fraction is, though I doubt it includes a majority people who have decent ISPs or are reading
email from work) but there’s no doubt it’s strongly biased towards the technologically less-literate.
They’ll buy your product – just as soon as they have finished emailing this nice-sounding prince in Nigeria who has just
contacted them.

In general, you cannot see when someone has read your email. That’s not how email or the internet works.
Anyone who says they can do this for you, without giving you a rather long list of qualifiers (which may make you rather less excited about the whole idea!) is either too ignorant to be selling anything related or is knowingly lying.

Wayne

In your rant you assert that it is not possible to track email to the degree claimed but provide no explanation as to why you believe this . Rather than criticize the technically illiterate perhaps explaining WHY you believe this would be more beneficial to our fellow readers. Not doing so insures that we ignore your missive as opinionated pablum and dismiss you as a crank.

Steve

Because the tracking depends on an image being displayed in the recipient’s email client. The recipient would have to be allowing images to be displayed in received email. Most technologically-literate people don’t do that, because they know that if they do, there is a strong possibility the email is being tracked. And many people aren’t particularly comfortable with that.

If you want to know if I read your email, request a read receipt. If I choose not to send you a read receipt, that’s my business.

zyde

Nish Pfister

I know this is a bit late to get in on, but isn’t the burden of proof with the one who makes the claim in the first place, i.e. saying you can track emails and know when someone opened it, which is quite a bit of a claim. Because the program would have to embed code in every email that detects when it’s opened and then sends a message back. If that’s the case, it would be nearly unethical to use the program.

James

^^^^ this

Perhaps you have been suckered in by their own marketing Dan? This will only work on the fools who are send read reciepts / change the default settings …

On the other hand tools like this are for targeting fools and their money …so perhaps it will achieve the goal the leaches of society that use it are targeting. It is not new either, things like this have been around for years, so I’m not quite sure why there is the hype?

skythra

Hey guy,

They know because when you open the email, it contains a hosted image, it queeries a website to load that image and that website knows that you have provided that image. Therefore each time you open that image, that website send that image again, so it knows if you looked once or twice.

I mean, i know you think right inside your text only formatted emails, but there’s a 1×1 pixel image cleverly being used to see where someone is located when they opened the image (thanks to the IP request of the device) and how many times (user behaviour). Yeah there are caveats, cached images, images off be default but overall you saying its impossible is simply you not even having read the article.

Anyway good luck in your career of pretending to know better, i see you’re doing well at it.

Andrew

What you are talking about is ‘checking to see if an image has loaded’; entirely different argument.

He said it was impossible to ‘check if an email was read’. He was correct.

There is no way to ‘check if an email has been read’ without ‘checking to see if an image has loaded’; without that second part, the first part IS impossible. And since many users/email readers/email webistes have images turned off by default, then yes, it is impossible to inherently check without an outside source if that email has been read.

Also, if I wanted to, I find that image, copy its URL into my browser’s addressbar and auto-refresh it through a plug-in. Does that mean the email was read 1,000s of time? No. Why? Checking to see if an image has been visited does NOT check if an email has been read.

It IS impossible to have reliable data on whether an email has been read based on how many times an image file has been loaded. It may be an indication but there’s so many, many flaws in the approach that using the data as even soft statistics would probably lead to terrible actual marketing results.

Trinium42

Actually the SMTP and to a lesser degree IMAP support read receipts. In fact in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo…..ETC There is a setting on whether or not you want to enable read receipts. Allot of times the first time your email client runs across one it will ask you if you if you want the person to be able to receive the read receipt, and also there will be a check box asking if you want to be asked this again.

Also, you could easily find out what block(s) of IP addresses Verizon wireless and other carriers use for mobil Ip’s. Since the receipt will be sent from there you could derive whether or not it was a mobile device. There are certain things that could through this off….like if you physically Enabled email forwarding from your home….But an algorithm could sort that out in more cases then not, and it would give you more info later on.

Finally allot of people will have a small signature pic, or something like it at the end of all their emails by default. Some are built into the msg, some are not and are hosted by flickr or dropbox or google drive (you get the idea) Well if you click display pictures, or (Most likely) Your email is setup to just show them, because more and more email’s (including basically all from any business) are using Http elements in their email. The reason isn’t to track you, but because if you send out emails with media attached, the emails are going to be big, load slowly, and cost money to whoever is sending ALLOT of them whether you read them or not. You could simply delete it, your spam filter might get it……BUT as soon as you open the email, the pic opens (Like A pic of a BBQ on sale from costco) and their website knows that someone from your IP has looked at their email. Correlate that with other data……And a million other things and finding out what town you live in…or even if they’ve read that email at X time and date and location. (General location, not your house).

So the author didn’t go into all of that….because the article would be so long you wouldn’t read it in the first place. It’s one mans experience and opinion of a piece of software. Not Technical article with Empirical data. You can fine those too…But their usually huge PDF’s without comments to complain in!

Dan Shure

Randy G

Andre

You don’t know what you’re talking about. All that’s necessary is putting a tagged 1-pixel GIF in the email’s HTML to track opens.

I use Campaign Monitor on a weekly basis. When you launch an email blast, you’re offered a “Worldview” dashboard that displays a map that gets studded in real time with captioned pins, the captions showing the name and city of the each recipient as the email is opened (it’s surprisingly fun to watch dozens of emails open in real time just seconds after they were sent). My understanding is that most email promotion platforms have a similar dashboard.

No, you’re not getting the recipient’s GPS location, and not all opens are actual reads, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can track opens—quite easily, in fact.

Shayne O

Ronny

Outlook does the tracking using read receipts, which may be turned off trivially (and I’ve been asked by people in the past how to do so). YesWare uses a 1 bit pixel image to do its tracking, a method which Outlook/Exchange don’t support. Most company internal mail will also have loading of images from the Internet disabled, if your IT staff are competent and have not been instructed otherwise.

Both methods can be disabled fairly easily. My own email will not (by default) work with either.

However, in my case at least the image version is more likely to work, as I do often enable images on individual emails I’ve been sent once I believe they’re legitimate, whereas I have a simple block on read receipts.

Outlook is an excellent client if you are using an Exchange server or Office365. Otherwise, it’s still decent but has some shortcomings. Its main problem is that it is largely single-tasking, so certain types of issues with mailboxes can cause problems with Outlook where other mail clients will cope much more smoothly.

Shayne O

B Ernest

I had this, and after so many tracked emails it asked me to pay for and and upgrade to continue. However maybe something just changed because all my accounts that had no more track-able time is still doing it.

Goober

Rich

Have used it for a few months and find it unobtrusive, fairly intuitive and useful in the right situation. If your serious about sales you wont just add a template, change the name and press the dollar button but to have the facts, a core part of your sales blurb or your usual attachments ready to go can save alot of time. The mail tracking can be handy tool but on the flipside the old excuse “I didnt recieve your mail” is no longer a weak excuse but a big fat lie. Busted..

Hypatia

James S

Those of you who are insinuating that this isn’t relevant because Product ‘x’ did it a couple years ago. No one cares. Of course other products have been doing it. They’ve been doing it for a decade now, not just recently. I’m genuinely surprised at the amount of people who didn’t know images in your email can be used for basic tracking. This is why GMail has images turned off by default.

It does seem to be an interesting idea, but it sounds like a well-designed demo software. No serious emailer is going to send less than 100 emails, and I dare you to use this on your business contacts. For an individual, I have to wonder at the real benefit. So you know Tom read your email. Is he routinely lying to you about that? Will you have the balls to call him a liar because you track everyone’s open emails?

And for the joker who asked if this is what the NSA has done, either you are borderline special needs or a troll.

Win

Dan, first thanks you for making aware this terrific ‘FREE’ app. Also, a big huzzzzah! to you for an excellent review. The graphics were invaluable to internalizing this wealth of detail.
You’re appreciated!

David Caron

Dan, This is a great review. I’ve shared it with people because you’re just as excited as I am about yesware. Thanks for doing the hard work of putting together a valuable review for us to share with friends.

Dan Shure

Dan J. Andrews

It was certainly a good review. It also makes me want to never open another email again. Or buy a counter-blocking app that blocks automatically so I don’t have to read the fine print on my email accounts to figure out how to block things.

matrix

JoeGhost

Until Google starts “thinking security” a great deal more than they apparently do now, I would be very cautious using any of their apps, especially if you use it for anything that might involve sensitive information.

Somehow a hacker from somewhere in Romania managed to hack into my GMail account, change my password (thus locking me out), and then proceeded to hijack the email addresses off of every archived email in my account.

Gary Golden

With this software you assume that if people read your product that they want your product for which that would be a wrong assumption. Better to assume that if they want your product they will call or email for more information thus making this software useless. Personally if someone followed up with a phone call or email and I deleted the first email I would deleted the second email also and hang up on them if they called.

Write quality content for your website or put better emails together and leave the rest to the consumer, if you annoy them once the chances of ever making a sale becomes zero.

Dan Exall

Gary: if any serious salesperson took your statement to be indicative of the general mood of their prospective clients then their company’s growth and development would slowly grind to a halt, with revenues falling and redundancies increasing as uptake of their product dropped from falling sales to the point of reduced development, headcount and ultimately bankruptcy as competitors won their market share. Perhaps this could even be your company and your salary or position, which could be paid for from the revenue from salespeople who are generating the interest and ultimately revenue to facilitate the continuing engagement of the brightest and best candidates that fulfil the role that you do, to develop an open and engaging work environment around them where a positive environment is fostered, as are manners and good grace.

There are prospective clients out there who are interested in the developments in their industry, gain insight from educated salespeople, compare products and services and no doubt remain a leading asset to their employer due to their inquisitiveness and attentiveness in their sphere. These are the type of contacts that good salespeople introduce themselves and their products or services to throughout the course of their working day and who’s response and reactions in relation to initial introductory activity it is important for us to retain visibility of, so that we are able to work out what approach best suits their work activities and be a constructive an asset to their delivery as possible before we’ve imparted any of our industry knowledge – the activity of their companies’ peers, trends or developments in industry technologies or services, perhaps even resources or events that would be of benefit to their career or development directly.

If we managed to strike up a conversation with a prospective client, with a self-contained attitude of the nature seemingly displayed above I’m sure any self-respecting salesperson would politely end the conversation fairly soon so that their time and energy were able to be better directed fundamentally towards a well-mannered person – manners are a good indicator of someone’s state of mind and from this more subtle indicators can probably be read such as job satisfaction, open-mindedness and probably even I would say some reflection of people’s competency, if not motivation or productivity. What if that first email had been overlooked by a person who’s level of activity meant that their attention to the non-essential items in their inbox was one of the areas that suffered first throughout their day – even that the mail had been deleted in their routine archiving process, that it had been caught by some spam filter or a combination of these issues had meant that even the second email did not achieve a response? What if the offering was complex, which simply couldn’t be presented to highlight the most relevant area for the client without a consultative process from which an organically developed solution arose which simply wasn’t there before? There could be something entirely unforseen which meant that either or both emails weren’t received, or a response simply wasn’t forthcoming which bore no relation to the prospective client’s attitude towards that particular approach.

There are many things that are essential in people’s working hours – taking the time to speak to salespeople is usually not during any one of those hours, but for a great many people it possibly is essential as part of their overall role, and a good salesperson will ensure that this is an relaxed, engaging and mutually beneficial process that generates exponential benefits when compared to the time actually taken to establish contact and understanding in the first instance. For the salesperson it’s all a matter of finding the right clients that understand what could be being offered as well as and how they might receive and benefit from that offering. Any tool which simplifies the essentials of the process of doing whilst increasing our approach’s effectiveness and relevance is invaluable, both to us and to our clients.

Bernie

Emil Isanov

John

It’s ridiculous that so many people are excited about an out-dated way of contacting potential clients. Seriously, how many of you open an e-mail and tell it to accept images? YesWare has its advantages, but this isn’t one of them.

Rob Burns

I started using email tracking about 8 years ago. The first program I used (cannot remember the name, they were eventually taken over), was perfect for reporting when the email arrived in the person’s email box and for every time they opened it. There was an optional “beacon self-destruct” so that it could not be found on the recipient’s client. Colleagues and I used it as “registered email” for legal purposes. We had received an opinion from an attorney that backed up his assertion with case law to demonstrate that it could be used to prove delivery similar to sending a registered letter.

I still use something similar but don’t like it so I’m going to give Yesware a try. Thanks for the review.

Michael Ryan

If I found out someone I know has this, and then uses it to email me about not emailing a response to them…well I would block them or this or whatever you do to stop it. But I would be F-in pissed. its my business when to respond to email just as much as its my business to respond or pick up a phone call or text…

Buster Magee

What more can one ask for ?.. here’s a start … how about privacy.

I was finding this article more depressive than impressive whilst reading. Some faith was restored reading a number of the comments above. Someone once said there was no problem as to whether they’ll make computers to ‘think’ like people … the problem is if people start thinking like computers.

Jippoes

I think many folk are missing the point here. The assumption is that this is a cold call application and everyone will have pictures disabled. In my case I would be using it with a large group of contacts who I deal with constantly but who I am still trying to sell to. They would not have my email pics blocked.

The app may not do anything that hasn’t been seen in other programs but if it pulls them all together and makes them easy to use then it is a powerful tool. The iPhone is old technology magnificently presented and engineered.

I do hate using products outside Outlook for mail but our business recently switched from MS to Google cloud to manage everything for us and the savings are pretty good. I am still learning to use the google server capabilities and I must admit I still use Outlook as the GUI but Google are making it cheap and easy.

Kaelinda

As a consumer, I never disable images except in emails from people I interact with personally. No commercial email ever gets images unblocked. Nevertheless, I get so many spam messages that I’ve had to resort to ‘Mailwasher’ to get rid of them. With Mailwasher, once I put a commercial emailer on my ‘blacklist’, I never see another email from him. This has reduced the number of spam messages in my ‘junk’ folder and in my inbox. Enormously.

Damian Ondore

I love the basic functionality of Yesware.
I found that it didn’t handle identifying WHO opened the email very well. If I sent an email within my organisation, it would count more open than I knew were possible. Can’t work out why.

When an email is forwarded, I found that it registers an open for anyone who works in that organisation.
Ultimately, I didn’t think that it was worth paying for premium features, and once the free credits ran out, I stopped using it. I’ll try it again in 6 months or so, and see where they are then.

Abe Original

Gordon

Compared with YAHOO or even OUTLOOK, gmail is crap for a start but, more importantly who wants big brother watching sometimes you don’t want to reply to an e-mail. Outlook has always offered the option to send a read receipt, but them you end up with double the mail with all the receipts coming back to you, nothing new here, just recycling of ideas, gmail copying outlook again, as with the style of layout.
Guess the thing to do is ignore any e-mails sent to you from a google gmail account from now on.

LL

Tommy

I know not what this is about, but I shall investigate soon. Google has been messing with my mail for some time now. Wish they would leave well alone. I was looking for another mail provider. There are plenty of Browsers about. Google seems to want to take over our PC’s, (I have laptop with Windows 7) .

I gather lots of folk are sticking with Windows XP. It does a dam good job. Google annoys me because I cannot even get in touch with them. They are interlopers who want to take over everything. When Microsoft stop “supporting” Windows XP I may go back to it. We don’t need constant updates. The Operating System should be correct before it is released to the public, not trialled on the public. Not the same thing, maybe but I have a calculator 40 years old which without updates, gives excellent results. I don’t need enhanced websites. Someone is making money out of this at our expense.

James

Michael Charlton

Neil Bellamy

Well here’s my tuppence worth as a heavy email user and consumer. Personally, whether an email has been read or not, makes no difference, how often do genuine emails finish up in your spam folder? Quite often in my cases with the filters I have set.How often do I open images even in a trusted email? Not very often.
How often do I read marketing or “keep me informed” email updates and more to the point, do I really want to be telemarketed just because I have had a peek at one such email? No, I don’t. How far leftfield is it to assume if that were the case, Amazon would be ringing me daily suggesting purchases, rather than just the twice daily email 😉
I have no problem with people using tracking software to see if emails have been opened providing it obviously protects my identity and data, what i do have a problem with is the assumption that an opened email is an invite to further conversation unless that conversation is invited. The companies withthat mind set, will soon find they are treated the same way as the majority of uninvited callers soliciting everything from solar panels, energy cost comparisons and the guys that are “not trying to sell you anything”. Gullible we may be, but stupid we aren’t. Personally I like to use the old fashioned approach…..(ring, ring, ring, ring, “hello John, it’s Neil, did you get the email I sent you about the thing?, you did? that’s great”

james adams

Personally I find any invasive advertising to be a complete turn off, making me reluctant to ever deal with these companies out of principle. If you send me these emails I will block them and actively avoid whatever product it concerns.
Creepy, invasive and rude.

..The amount of advertising already flooding our lives is overwhelming and perhaps indicative of a messed up society.

Charles

So the best defense against the dark arts and to maintain stealth mode (your privacy from everyone except the NSA) is to never communicate with someone using gmail? Why does everyone Google, Facebook, etc. always assume you want everything you do broadcast to the world? In my case, I have to wonder why anyone would care? Why can’t they just deliver their product and leave me alone? At least Chrome and Explorer have “incognito” or similar modes. I frankly don’t care if NSA reads my email. I don’t do illegal stuff, but I don’t necessarily want everything I do broadcast to the world. This is very troubling and downright maddening.

Dan Shure

Hi Charles and thanks for the comment. I think people are confused about what this plugin does. It doesn’t give anyone access to the content of your email. It does something all email marketing platforms (Constant Contact, MailChimp etc) have done for a long time, which is place a 1×1 pixel image in the email sent. This is nothing new. The only thing different about Yesware is it makes it easy to track email opens from within Gmail. But this tracking ability has existed for a very long time.

Brian

Like everyone I have used Google search engine, they were/are a good search engine, but it collects your data – I always delete the cookie when I have found what I want. Their Chrome browser tracks your every move, similarly Google +. I have 3 Gmail address’, which were useful at one time, but I no longer trust them, so because of this move of Google I will be deleting them. There is something about the way American companies do business that is on the nose. I still use Windows, and I reckon its the biggest virus of them all.

Karin

Hi I found this an interesting article and the discussion afterwards has been enlightening as well. I use Gmail and I organise kids’ basketball camps and I find that often I’m wondering if emails have been recieved and read by parents, even if the recipient hasn’t had the common courtesy to reply yes or no. It’s not that I’m being nosey with them but to get these camps underway we need a certain number of kids. I realise that people that actually want to do those camps will find you whether you keep asking them or not. The way I would use Yesware is to track who was opening the emails but not wanting to sign up and then deleting them after a certain number of non responses so as not to clog my email system either.

If I’m just sending out normal emails from gmail, without any pictures embedded into them, would yesware work on my gmail and let me know who has actually even opened the email? For me it would be quite interesting for me to know of the emails that were opened immediately and the ones that got left for days, unopened in the inbox.

Dan Shure

Hi Karin

Nice, that’s a great potential use for this plugin! Yesware will work in your situation ONLY if the end receiver has said “yes, display images in emails from ….” this is because there is a tiny 1×1 pixel image embedded in yesware emails (that’s how email tracking functionality works most of the time) – if you have sent people emails with images in the past, they may already be allowing images to show. You can also maybe send them an email with an actual image to get them to approve seeing images from your emails.

Dan Shure

Err nope. It puts an image in the email (which never “loads” onto the user’s machine, the email stays in the email server). This is no different than receiving an email in which you can see a picture. There is also no code being run on the user’s machine. The only thing new about yesware is the ability to run it from Gmail. Email subscription programs have been doing this stuff for years. You might as well unsubscribe from every email newsletter because those all track email stats in the same way.

RMHC

Hi Dan,
I have read a lot of these comments and rants, mostly interesting and sometimes informative. My question to you is simple. How can I set my email client to not permit these kind of intrusions? Outlook, Gmail or whatever???
I await your reply, Thanks rmhc.

Dan Shure

I am not an expert in this, but the best way I know of is to not allow images to show. The technology works by placing a small 1 pixel image in the email, so if you do not allow images the tracking will not work.

City

Walter Oslund

Bob

I have been using email tracking for 3 years now and believe me, it’s an invaluable tool. Read notify is what I use and it is pretty damn good (and cheap). But I will definitely check out yesware now that you popped the lid on it.

Robson Grant

Wil Reynolds

Hey Dan, funny I was just doing some research on Yesware for something totally unrelated and saw your face show up (authorship FTW). Of course seeing your face prompted me to click through, and then I re-read this piece and thought DAMN this is a GREAT post, one that you should probably re-post every so often, as it is appears to be a really great tool! I was looking for some gmail sales software solutions and came across this, going to share again!

Dan Shure

Thanks man! I always forget to re-post stuff that’s more “evergreen” – thanks for sharing again. Yeah I saw this tool having a lot of potential, and hope people try to see the psychology of email a bit better.

Jamie Knop

Good write up. I have used it before but it bugs out when sending emails through multiple SMTP accounts connected to Gmail unfortunately. Currently use Boomerang but if YesWare sorted the above issue out I would probably convert.

btly

What an interesting read. The ability to ID, locate, time stamp, map, to plan ones business, and battles will be such a invaluable tool. Wait! It rings a bell. There was once a time, not long ago, when emails arrived in my personal private email box, which appeared ordinary.. except that once I opened them, I Immediately had another email arrive telling me I had just opened, and read the content. Then, the threats from the unbalanced cyber-stalker continued. The anti-stalker community showed me how to read the source, and I called the company, (in TX), yes, I was listed as a “business contact”. My name was removed, but the company, to their credit, made me understand that stalkers simply move to another service. It took two years of constant fear to “resolve the issue”, which is basically that I didn’t respond, A. never feed a troll and/or stalker, and especially when they used my name in an unsavory blog, (anti-stalker group said Google your name, which I Never do anymore, as it would Tick as a visit on their public blog counter), and boasted on a public forum, I just let them have their day of glory. The person still knows where I live, and May? keep tabs on me??? I had to choose to not check to keep my Own sanity. You just live with it, knowing the courts are so overwhelmed with people that follow through with threats, doing physical bodily harm, or worse, that stalking/bullying is a non-issue. I use gmail as a study related inbox only. So at least I’m safe there – for now. Thought it might be interesting to understand how such services can be misused. Be careful “out there”.

Michael Sharkey

Great post, I’m a huge Yesware fan! Just a quick shout out to Prospect Ace (Google Chrome plug-in) to make the email research much easier. It helps find verified emails and demographic information: http://www.autopilothq.com/prospectace

luko

Sorry I didn’t want to pass all the comments to have your opinion. But when you install a system like Yesware, you have to accept that they get access to all of your navigation information and all of your Data on all websites. That sounds disturbing and much like Big Brother. You don’t even know what this information is use for.

Do you know any similar apps where they don’t ask for that type of information?

Dan Shure

Anne

I wouldn’t want someone watching my mailbox and peering in my window to see when I read or tossed the junk mail they sent me. I don’t want my mother to know I read an email but waited 2 days to call. I don’t think someone who bought my email off a list should be able to track my whereabouts…..What I would like is a little freakin’ privacy to not have somebody or their software watching every single damn thing I do every minute of the day!! So if I’m “rude” to a sales-person who has contacted me out of the blue…well I believe it is entirely justified, considering they’ve been minding my business without any invitation from me.

Oliver McCloud

Jagdish Mehta

Jay Cadilak

I like how so many people seem blissfully unaware that everything they have ever done on the internet was saved, stored, and will never be deleted. By the people they don’t want to be tracked by. Ever hear of Echelon? Geez. “The unaware are unaware they are unaware.”

This looks like a very well made tool, and it integrates well. It’s been over a year since you posted this Dan (on 4/20!! lol), just curious if you’re still using it?

Dan Shure

Thomas Zickell

Hi Dan,
One feature that you left out is if our trying to measure employees open rates. YesWare can send you an e-mail every month telling you all the details for each employee very cool.

Now I use Toutapp and Get Signals made by HubSpot. However, YesWare is free and the other two are not.
I all of these products work better on Google apps then Exchange however I have found that signals and Toutapp out work very well on MS exchange even on OWA.

One Toutapp feature I wish YesWare had that has will tell you if somebody has clicked on a link in your e-mail taking them to your website where you can see all the pages they have visited.

Great writeup for product not very well known and I believe very valuable.

Craig Moussa

I think some of the tinfoil hats have affect peoples brains, needless to say but we’re living in an information world. Everything is tracked, being tracked etc. The fact that you all accessed this page one way or another via an external click through, means you’ve been tracked. I suggest if you don’t want to be tracked, please cancel your internet subscription, throw your computer away, cancel any subscriptions to ANYTHING, sell all technology and move to a cabin in the woods and live off the land.

On the brighter side, this seems like an awesome app, something I felt was missing from Gmail for quiet sometime now. Great article as well.

PaulM

The comments on this post are hilarious. So much paranoia! Presumably, some people don’t answer the phone, even when they’re there, so the caller can’t track if they’re there or not? You know the credit card companies also track where you spend your money, too, and some loyalty programs will actually make suggestions based on prior purchases – INCREDIBLE!

If you’ve agreed to receive email from a business or organisation, I think it’s reasonable for the sender to assume you’ve also agreed to allow them to track if the emails have been opened or not. If you haven’t agreed to receive the email, that’s called SPAM, and there is a law against that. However annoying and upsetting, to think that your every online move and gesture is not being tracked is just naive. Do they need to know where you’ve opened it? Probably not, but it’s not the fault of yesware that information is available, so why not use it?

Believe it or not, marketing and advertising is about giving YOU the products and services YOU want. You will always see advertising – more and more so, in fact – but removing yourself from the loop will just mean that most of it is irrelevant.

Fitz

My email marketing software lets me tracks opens–whether they actually read it or not is up for debate–but I do have issues with the whole notion, unless the end user (the recipient) knows that their actions are being monitored and curated for future marketing, research–or worse and more nefarious–reasons.

I have always used unopened mail sends as indicative of a flaw in my marketing strategy, or simply a bad email campaign. I have never collected data on an individual user; in fact, it never crossed my mind. In retrospect, I am not at all comfortable with this supposed “awesome” feature as it is a gross intrusion on an individual’s privacy. There is no other way to word it politely because it is deceptive to the recipient who more than likely has no idea that simply opening an email from a theoretically trusted source (and any good salesperson should be a trusted source).

The fact that it is free should be a warning sign that it is not free for as a subterfuge of deceit it makes a mockery of freedom.

My plea (albeit a naive plea) is to use the tools you have for monitoring people’s emails have wisely and discretely or do not. use them at all.

Yesware, by any other term is simply spying on the uninformed or the ill-informed. There needs to be transparency for all parties involved for there to be any shred of a moral foundation for our marketing strategies.

Glenn

Recent announcements by Google regarding images in email when using the gmail web interface indicate that now they pre-retrieve the image once, and cache them for display when the email is read. So this form of tracking will be misleading if the targeted gmail account uses the gmail web interface. I’m not sure if that applies to the gmail apps on various mobile devices. Unless they rewrite the links within the emails to point to their cached copies (which would be inappropriate), the Google image caching would not apply to people who use email clients to access their gmail via POP or IMAP.

Andrew Heidt

My team and I are avid Yesware users, even participating in some of their Beta programs. I love this plugin, and it has definitely improved my ability to generate new business and minimized missed followup windows.

Yes, there are things to improve, but this plugin seriously kicks butt.

Tony

Will it notify you when Google and NSA read your and your recipients’ emails? No. Another good tool to leverage as spying. The other features (sans tracking) seem good but not novel…been around in other clients and servers for some time (e.g. Follow-up / Remind Me, etc.). Wait, it’s almost free!

bobs4bob

I saw a few comments asking if it was even possible to track an email. Programs such as free greeting card companies, like 123 greeting cards, always ask if you would like to be notified when the card you sent has been read. I can’t even fathom of how many free cards are sent out from their sites, but on occasion I have sent a few and was notified as to when the card had been opened and read. As a matter of fact they send notices if your card hasn’t been opened. I’m no technology expert but this capability has been in use for some time, whether they are using some small picture or what, you can be tracked by what ever means a sender might choose to use

Debra

Nobody

I’m glad I’m not the only one who notices all the spelling and grammar errors in these posts. For respondents who some would assume should be awfully smart, based on the content in their posts, I have to wonder how they ever graduated middle school. Or maybe they didn’t.

Dan Shure

Mark

Actually, as you guys have pointed out there’s a both pros and cons to a product like this – relying on what’s often called a “web beacon”. We have a product called http://www.docsmit.com, (disclosure: I work on the product) where a signature (of a form consistent with the E-SIGN Act) is required before the content of the message is given. The product is available to both individuals and companies and isn’t subject to the false positives and false positives of a web beacon. Messages can also be sent for free (as long as they don’t take up lots of space). You may want to consider it.

Jan

Okay now I am more happy than ever to not open any emails than those I know are from friends and family. Thank you for the heads up. Cheers
Ps. Sorry but I won’t be opening any of your replies to this email.

Dan Shure

john

Just another reason not to open any e-mail from anyone. Big brother sure has fooled the masses with social media but when it comes to tracking our e-mail they have gone too far. Sure the corporations will love this and the programmers will find another reason to charge more money for their work, but the normal consumer is regulated to be just another paawn in their game as they try to sell you everything you really do not need. I have come to point in my life that if anyone sends me an offer I didn’t ask about I make sure I never do business with them. This includes all political and religious junk mail and of course all corporate advertising disquised as mail.

Roger Carter

Zeeshan Dogar

It’s pretty cool that you can have these features in one consolidated view of a great email service like gmail. I haven’t tested it, but similar user activity metrics can be found in many free apps such as MailChimp. 100 free email opens per month isn’t very much. I loved the maps feature and the fact you can see what device they used.

Charlie

gene

As usual, Google produces a clear and useful app. As usual, Google acquire a new layer of private information that it will use or reveal to the Feds upon a request. Too bad. Eventually, Google will have great information about the lowest common denominator of people. IX and Tor are good places to defend yourself. Also, look into this the TPP treaty being secretly run through Congress this November. Since we are not allowed to know about it, JUST SAY NO. Act on this if you value your freedom.

michael

The application just sat there when I tried to check it out – I think the volume of mail I have just freaks these add-ins out.
People are amusing regarding sales messages, if they come across something they actually want, or need they are the first to tell their friends about it, but how else do you get to know about products and services that could make your life better if there were no sales people? – Easy enough to ignore them if it upsets you that much.

Sarah at Journeys of The Zoo

I use an automated email service (Madmimi) so unfortunately, I can’t use this tool. While I know what my click through rates are, I don’t know what time people are clicking through and that would be really useful. Thanks for sharing.

Roedy Green

Dan Shure

Steve Hall

Been a paid user for over a year. Use Yesware only to keep track of project email when it leaves my machine. No fancy SEO use. The popup alerts when someone opens your e-mail are worth the cost alone (however, when your mail is forwarded — even within the same domain — it doesn’t ID who has opened the mail, so you get a flurry of un-ID’d alerts — which has an odd entertainment value).

Aleks

Indeed it’s a good piece of software(i use it just for few weeks), but what i am essentially missing here, is numbers…open rates, reply rates, click rates and etc. While it is handy to see who, when and where open an individual email, it would be even better to see a bigger picture and %. Say, you are doing outreach, is there a way to see % of opens and replies?
And another question, I am using yesware with gmail, i got multiple accounts hooked up into one, is there a way to see analytics just for one of them?

Dan Shure

Hi Aleks – these are all great questions. Unfortunately I haven’t gone that deep into the tool and data. I’d definitely recommend reaching out the YesWare directly: http://www.yesware.com/contact-us/ – thanks!

ThosewhocallmeTim

Sorry, but I enjoy the ability of email senders having no clue whatsoever whether or not I read their stinking emails, so I can later claim “Sorry Pal, I don’t recall seeing your email, my server must have bounced it to junk mail.”

At best this will be used by small businesses and at worst, and more likely, by scammers and spammers.

Imagine an unverified list of 1million email addresses purchased on the web. The email address harvesters then send a phishing message to 1million addresses. If only 5% of users open the email then the phishers have just gained a list of 50k active email addresses with no work at all. These can then be sold and resold etc.

steve

jim onur

This is an amazing tool, however, please read, and understand the terms of their service:

. you are giving away all your contacts, all your emails, including the email content themselves, everything you receive in your mailbox is open to them. This includes your calendar, your appointments
. they will give no guarantee for the security of your emails, your content, or your privacy or anything
. having google 100% access to every bit of information is severe enough, I really don’t see the upside of having another 3rd party in the same boat
. whatever upside you gain by the tracking, know that you, yourself is being tracked.

never forget: if the product is free, that means you are the product.

I am sure some people would find enough benefit out of this, it seems like a great idea and a brilliant implementation.

Lee

Lol have you even actually used it? The app puts a blank white image into each email so that it can track when it has been opened. That image appears as a red X as in image not found to most people using Outlook, so when one of my reps tried this months ago it was a huge nightmare as I had 3 customers contact me complaining that we were invading their privacy, and one even refused to do business with us any further because they couldn’t believe we were monitoring their interactions with our email.

a

Iryna

Thank you for the great article. It’s very useful for every sales rep. I’m also using 3rd party solution to integrate Salesforce and Gmail. Heard good feedback about yesware but never tried. Now I’m using ContactMonkey (http://www.contactmonkey.com/salesforce-gmail-integration). They allow me to view and edit any Salesforce information without leaving Gmail and provide detailed email statistics. Saves tons of time!

Sara Mitchell

Hi Dan,

Great, great rundown of why email tracking apps like Yesware are so useful. Thanks! I actually saw this post several months ago, and I took your advice and started using Yesware. It was pretty great, although I didn’t use all the features.

But then Yesware decided to end its free tier, and I really don’t want to pay for email tracking. A few days ago I found RocketBolt, a free plugin in the Chrome Store (http://bit.ly/1X1JHR8) and I’m a big fan already. It combines Yesware’s email tracking with social profile information (like Rapportive, but more expansive). I also find it easy to use, which is a plus.

I like it a lot, but I’m curious what you think. Have you heard of RocketBolt? What’s your opinion?